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VANCOUVER -- Former IWA-Canada president Jack Munro, the powerful and profane labour icon during the heyday of the B.C. forest industry, died Friday of a chronic illness at age 82 after being in poor health the past year.

Munro was raised in poverty on a Prairie relief farm and had a Grade 10 education. But his natural leadership skills took him to the top of the trade union movement and into the corridors of power.

The hard-luck kid from Alberta would eventually have meetings with premiers and prime ministers, dinners with British royalty, and win an Order of Canada.

Denny Boyd, a columnist at The Vancouver Sun, wrote in 1989 that Munro's actions affected almost every British Columbian. "He's a guy who can call 30,000 workers off the job, send the province into a five-month strike or save the province from a crippling general strike by negotiating head to head with a right-wing premier."

In his 1988 memoir, Union Jack, Munro said of his career: "If I had to sum up what it is I've tried to accomplish, it is to make trade unions an accepted part of society."

As head of the International Woodworkers of America for Western Canada, the larger-than-life, long-limbed Munro was straight out of central casting.

His towering physique, at 196 centimetres (six-feet five inches) and 120 kilograms (265 pounds), was as imposing as the giant cedars felled by his IWA members. His voice was as loud and scabrous as a chainsaw.

He routinely mangled the English language. But the gruff labour leader always made his salty message loud and clear with full-throttle harangues in union halls and at bargaining sessions with forest companies. And when he wasn't losing his cool, Munro was charming colleagues or opponents with his pugnacious sense of humour.

Once during a reception, Munro got into a verbal spat with Prince Philip. The IWA leader told the Duke of Edinburgh that many Canadian workers are unable to afford to own houses. Prince Philip observed that Canadians are always complaining and Munro diplomatically responded: "Well, that's bulls--t."

Premier Christy Clark said Munro was driven to make life better for working British Columbians.

"His contributions to B.C.'s labour movement and the province as a whole are immeasurable," she said in a statement. "British Columbia is far less colourful today with Jack gone."

Longtime B.C. forest industry executive Jake Kerr said Munro was a "giant of a man" in every regard.

"He certainly had his heart with the union and did a fabulous job for them," said Kerr, managing partner of Lignum Forest Products. "But behind all that was a very strategic guy who very seldom did something stupid. There were a number of strikes on his watch and a good portion of them were probably industry's fault rather than his."

Vancouver city councillor Geoff Meggs, a former executive director of the B.C. Federation of Labour, said no one could ever misunderstand where Munro stood on any issue.

"No one could ever lose sight of the fact that he stood firmly with his members," he said. "He didn't care if his members' views were unpopular with employers or with environmentalists. He spoke for his members and I think that was the source of his strength."

Former Vancouver Sun forestry reporter Gordon Hamilton recalls running into Munro at a coffee shop in Williams Lake, where controversial land use planning battles were raging.

"He came over and sat down and said: 'It's really about the working people up here. That's where the rubber hits the road and that's why I'm here,'" he said. "He wasn't looking to be quoted. It was just Jack speaking to me from the heart. Behind the politics and everything else, his heart was with the working people."

B.C. Federation of Labour president Jim Sinclair noted Munro spearheaded the creation of the Labour Heritage Centre, an organization dedicated to telling the stories of working people in B.C.

"Jack spent his working life determined to ensure that workers were treated fairly and that they and their unions deserved respect and recognition for their rightful place in Canadian society," Sinclair said in a statement.

Despite his hard edge and intimidating stature, Munro was an emotional and sentimental man who easily became choked up at public events.

Munro led the IWA between 1973 and 1992. During much of that period, the IWA was B.C.'s largest union and he was the province's most prominent labour leader.

And its most controversial.

Especially after he met with premier Bill Bennett at his Kelowna home in 1983 to negotiate an end to Operation Solidarity, one of the largest labour disputes in B.C. history. Munro would later describe his role as the front-man in the move to derail the Solidarity protest as "either the stupidest or the bravest thing I've ever done."

The Kelowna Accord ending the Solidarity movement prompted many left-wing activists, inside and outside of labour, to denounce Munro as a sell-out to the Socreds and the big corporations that backed them. Left-wing poet Tom Wayman voiced his anger over the Kelowna Accord with a work titled The Face of Jack Munro. It was a face, Wayman wrote, "puffy with greed and fright and satisfaction."

While Munro was more middle-of-the-road than many other union leaders and had an aversion to left-wing rhetoric, he had a strong social conscience. He saw unionism as way to make life better for average blue-collar British Columbians and he was a life-long supporter of the New Democratic Party. When former prime minister John Turner urged him to run as a federal Liberal candidate, Munro politely turned him down.

Munro clashed frequently with anti-logging activists who he believed were destroying the jobs of his members. Through much of the '90s, Munro headed the B.C. Forest Alliance, a company-funded public relations group created to counter the environmental lobby.

Munro opposed endangered species legislation that he believed would idle his members. He riled environmentalists when he provocatively told a newspaper reporter in 1990: "I tell my guys if they see a spotted owl to shoot it."

Munro's reputation as a pragmatic moderate in the labour movement made him a favourite of business, though he was also regarded as a tough negotiator.

The media had a lot of time for the bull-of-the-woods Munro and he for it. The IWA leader could always be counted on for a colourful quote, albeit one typically laced with a God damn profanity that would have to be edited out. He was a frequent guest on the radio and TV talk shows of his friend, broadcaster Jack Webster.

In many ways Munro personified an era that no longer exists. One where stable, high-paying blue-collar jobs sustained communities throughout B.C. One where industrial relations were volatile and labour leaders were mentioned on the front page as often as provincial cabinet members.

During the '70s and '80s, the forestry industry was the largest employer in the province. The IWA had 40,000 members in B.C. and was able to flex its muscle at the bargaining table and in Victoria.

This all changed in the '90s and in 2004, the IWA merged with the United Steelworkers of America. Its B.C. membership had been reduced to 28,000 because of mill closures and layoffs.

In his memoir, Munro noted the landscape had changed since he joined the IWA in the '60s. Heading into the '90s, it was much easier to organize than decades earlier when unionists had to be "hardcore street fighters."

"There are a lot of people out there who think I'm just an old-style, loud-mouthed trade union leader who pops off at the drop of a hat. Who knows? Maybe I'm a dying breed.

"The world changes every so often, and maybe my style of rhetoric isn't seen as much these days. Of course, it may be that the new trade union leaders just don't know how to do it anymore. We're all born into different eras, and we all have our own styles."

Munro, the eldest child of Scottish immigrants, was born in 1931 in Lethbridge, Alta. He was a big, rebellious kid who hated school. His father, a butcher, developed tuberculosis and was placed in a sanatorium. Munro's mother became destitute and moved the family to a relief farm during the Depression.

Munro's politics were shaped by those early years when he, according to Union Jack, came to believe the government "didn't really care about people very damn much."

He later recalled, with bitterness, how his mother once a month had to go to a relief office in Calgary and swear on a Bible that no one had given her family any clothes or food or money. Munro hated that and he hated the government agent, who looked after the relief farm, and would come into the Munro family's house and blow cigar smoke.

His father died of tuberculosis when Munro was 11 years old. Munro was sent to a high school in Calgary, where he realized that "I wasn't going to be a scholar."

He quit school after Grade 10, worked briefly on a farm and then found work as a machinist apprentice fixing steam engines for the CPR.

In 1952, Munro was transferred by the CPR from Calgary to Lethbridge, where he rented an apartment with Betty Anderson, a woman he had dated in Calgary. She was pregnant and so they married.

His marriage would last for 18 years but was not a happy one, Munro acknowledged in his memoir. "In retrospect, I guess we should have ended the marriage sooner. But instead of ending the goddamn thing, we just struggled along."

Terry, the eldest of Munro's three sons, was born in 1953, followed later by Dale and Scott. Years later, Munro believed he had failed as a father. "I know I wasn't home enough, nor did I do enough for my kids," he wrote in Union Jack. "I don't know how this affected them."

There were also problems on the job. The CPR was phasing out steam engines, switching to diesel. Munro was laid off but given work at a CPR diesel shop in Nelson.

A year later, he was laid off again - this time for good. So he signed up as a welder at the nearby Kootenay Forest Products, where he joined the union that would become his life.

Munro impressed other workers when he used an expletive to tell off a foreman who was hassling him. They asked him to become a shop steward. A year later, they elected him plant chairman for the IWA.

That he was a big tough guy not afraid of standing up to management made him a natural choice. Wayne Nowlin, president of the Cranbrook local, recalled that Munro was ambitious and "always used his size to his advantage."

The IWA leadership hired Munro as a business agent. Around the same time, Munro became active in the local NDP and in 1966 he ran unsuccessfully for the party in Nelson-Creston.

A year later, Munro led all the IWA locals in the southern interior in a bitter 224-day strike to gain wage parity with IWA members on the coast. Munro was in and out of court during the strike which, he later recalled, "was probably the single most important event that shaped me into the style of union leader that I am today."

Munro led a march down the main street in Nelson, warning the city that his union members were united and wouldn't allow scabs to take their jobs. The union ended up getting within 14 cents of parity with the coast. Munro had developed a new taste for power and "I couldn't see myself going back to being a business agent again."

Munro sought and won election as a regional vice-president. He moved to Vancouver in 1968, where he worked under IWA president Jack Moore, who treated him like his protege. Munro felt like he'd hit the big time.

"Anyway, here I was a kid with a Grade 10 education, and I was all of a sudden a hotshot in the biggest union in the province."

In 1973, Moore left the presidency and Munro took over. "So at 42, I was now earning $18,000 and running a $6-million enterprise with close to 50,000 members. It was scary."

The NDP was in power under premier Dave Barrett. It frequently clashed with the B.C. Federation of Labour, whose leadership felt Barrett wasn't pro-labour enough.

Munro disagreed and slammed Fed secretary-treasurer Len Guy for being critical of the new NDP labour code. Munro was a strong supporter of premier Barrett, who had invited the IWA leader on a trade trip to China.

Munro's first set of contract bargaining as president came in 1974. The negotiations introduced him to Keith Bennett, head of Forest Industrial Relations. The two men went to head to head in negotiations over the next two decades, but managed to retain a working friendship. They were famous for resolving impasses over a social drink or the phone.

Some IWA members and other labour leaders thought Munro was too friendly with Bennett, but Munro believed that "going out and being able to have a friendly b.s. has helped us solve a few problems."

Munro clashed often with leaders of the two pulp and paper unions. The friction escalated in 1975, when the striking pulp unions set up secondary pickets that idled thousands of IWA members.

Many other private sector unions were also on strike at the time, and the NDP government reacted by imposing back-to-work legislation. This angered the pulp unions and the B.C. Federation of Labour, but Munro and the IWA backed the NDP.

In the 1975 election, Barrett's NDP lost and Munro blamed the B.C. Fed and the pulp unions for helping return the Socreds to power.

From the outside, it looked like Munro was on a roll. But his personal life was often in a shambles. He was drinking heavily - usually rye whisky - and separated from his wife and three kids.

In 1976, Munro began dating Connie Sun, a lawyer who had done some Workers Compensation Board work for the IWA. Two years later, they moved in together and married in 1982. He credited her for getting him to stop drinking in 1984.

His new relationship with Sun helped Munro weather a tragic episode - the death of his youngest son, Scotty, at age 13, after being hit by a car. After 10 days of going to the hospital where his son lay in a coma, Munro made the decision to shut off the life-support machines. Friends said his son's death haunted him for years.

The Operation Solidarity protest against Bennett's fiscal restraint program defined Munro's career as much as any other event.

Throughout the summer and fall of 1983, the B.C. Federation of Labour and its president Art Kube organized mass rallies against the legislation.

In the fall, the B.C. Government Employees Union went on strike and a week later, most teachers were off the job. Every social or community group affected by the Socreds' restraint program was urging them on.

A general strike was in motion but Munro and many other private-sector union leaders were dead set against it.

Munro said he wouldn't allow his members to be forced to walk off the job in futility. "They weren't going to go out on the picket line, lose wages in one of the worst recessions since the 1930s - for what? To make sure that sexual preference is written into the human rights code?"

Munro sent out feelers to the business community and to the Socreds in hopes of finding a compromise. He lashed out at Kube and B.C. Teachers' Federation president Larry Kuehn for being too hard-line.

Key unions in the B.C. Fed agreed on a compromise, and chose Munro to deliver it to Bennett. They knew he was the one union leader who could take the heat and survive the fallout.

The premier demanded the meeting be held at his Kelowna home. Munro didn't like the idea but finally acquiesced, a decision he would later regret.

"It was far too palsy-walsy looking. It added to an image that we had done something wrong, that I was selling out the labour movement."

Munro was roundly criticized for the Kelowna Accord, even though he was simply carrying out the wishes of the Fed executive. He was bitter afterwards that many of his post-Solidarity critics were the same people who had been foursquare behind him going to Kelowna.

In 1986, he led the costliest strike in provincial history, a $2.5-billion, 18-week-long walkout, over contracting out.

That same year, Munro led the Canadian section of the IWA out of the American-based international. The new union was called IWA-Canada and Munro became its first president.

Munro retired from the IWA in 1992 and crossed over to the other side to become chairman of the B.C. Forest Alliance. He aggressively defended the forest industry against environmental groups critical of logging practices. In 1996, someone dropped off 10 bags of horse manure and a poster attacking Munro's pro-logging stance at his house. Munro blamed the stunt on "degenerate" environmentalists.

Munro retired from the Forest Alliance in 2000. He kept busy during his retirement years with his third wife, Deborrah, a cardiac nurse 20 years his junior. They shared a passion for motorcycle riding, heading off most summers on lengthy road trips.

But he retained his salty humour to the end. In 2004 he told a reporter that "everybody is swearing worse than I used to, on the radio, TV, in the paper. My 'God damns' seem pretty mild, actually."

Quotes from Jack Munro over the years.

Quoted in The New York Times in 1990:

"I tell my guys if they see a spotted owl to shoot it."

On Time magazine calling the protection of B.C.'s so-called Great Bear Rain Forest the top environmental achievement of 1999:

``You would think that a magazine the stature of Time would do more research.''

On being forced in 1999 to resign from the BC Ferries board after massive cost overruns were revealed on the fast-ferry project:

"You know, we look pretty goddamned silly, and we shouldn't, because we were really trying to make a difference. I guess we were the scapegoats."

In 1999, on the pro-industry Forest Alliance of B.C., which he headed at the time, joining forces with environmentalists in developing standards for a new green label for environmentally-friendly forest products:

"We've been at this battle for 10 years. We want to get out of this hassle."

In 2003, when interviewed about B.C. eco-warrior Tzeporah Berman's pivotal role in reaching the largest conservation agreement ever signed up to that time:

"The most frustrating aspect of Tzeporah Berman and company is the fact that the truth didn't matter a damn to them and that's very hard to fight,"

On a rift in the IWA in 2004, 12 years after he stepped down as its B.C. leader:

"There's always been battles within and without the IWA, and we've always had good scraps at conventions ... but the disagreements stayed at the conventions."

When asked in 2004 about his colourful language:

"Everybody is swearing worse than I used to, on the radio, TV, in the paper. My 'goddamns' seem pretty mild, actually."

At a summit on forestry worker deaths, which he moderated, in 2005:

"What the hell is going on out there? We have reported 41 forest industry deaths and the year is not yet finished."

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B.C. forest labour icon Jack Munro dies at age 82

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